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May 29, 2020

Squad’s cute little 50 mph solar-powered mini-EV just got even better

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Amsterdam-based Squad Mobility’s solar powered electric two-seater quickly caught our fancy the last time we covered it. Now the Squad Solar City Car is back with updated design options for the solar-powered microcar.

May 29, 2020

Making matter out of light: high-power laser simulations point the way

Posted by in categories: engineering, military, particle physics

A few minutes into the life of the universe, colliding emissions of light energy created the first particles of matter and antimatter. We are familiar with the reverse process—matter generating energy—in everything from a campfire to an atomic bomb, but it has been difficult to recreate that critical transformation of light into matter.

Now, a new set of simulations by a research team led by UC San Diego’s Alexey Arefiev point the way toward making matter from light. The process starts by aiming a high-power laser at a target to generate a magnetic field as strong as that of a neutron star. This field generates that collide to produce—for the very briefest instant—pairs of matter and antimatter particles.

The study, published May 11 in Physical Review Applied offers a sort of recipe that experimentalists at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) high-power laser facilities in Eastern Europe could follow to produce real results in one to two years, said Arefiev, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

May 29, 2020

All-electric Grand Caravan makes maiden flight

Posted by in category: transportation

An electric-powered Cessna 208B Grand Caravan lifted off a Moses Lake runway on 28 May, marking another milestone in a project that aims to bring all-electric flight to consumer air travel.

In taking flight, the Caravan became, according to the companies behind the project, the largest all-electric passenger or cargo aircraft ever to fly.

Continue reading “All-electric Grand Caravan makes maiden flight” »

May 29, 2020

Energy Scavengers: Static Electricity Could Power the World

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

By harvesting the everyday energy of static electricity, scientists may have found the world’s most plentiful source of renewable, sustainable power.

May 29, 2020

Static electricity as strong as lightning can be saved in a battery

Posted by in categories: energy, nanotechnology

Prof. Dong Sung Kim and his joint research team presented a new technology that can increase the amount of power generated by a triboelectric nanogenerator. The research team developed a high-efficiency integrated circuit to obtain reliable and practical electrical energy from the triboelectric nanogenerator.

May 29, 2020

Brood IX: Why 2020’s cicada visit will be different than past invasions

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

This spring will bring to North America a batch of 17-year cicadas known as Brood IX. Scientists are asking for help tracking them amid the global pandemic.

May 29, 2020

This amazing material could solve your commute’s biggest problem

Posted by in category: materials

Researchers have designed a new way to make concrete that would make frustrating cracks a thing of the past.

May 29, 2020

CNN crew released from police custody after they were arrested live on air in Minneapolis

Posted by in category: habitats

A CNN crew was arrested while giving a live television report Friday morning in Minneapolis — and then released about an hour later — as the crew covered ongoing protests over the death in police custody of George Floyd.

State police detained CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, his producer and his photojournalist shortly after 5 a.m. CT (6 a.m. ET) as Jimenez was reporting live from a street south of downtown, near where a police precinct building was earlier set ablaze.

May 29, 2020

Letting off electrons to cope with metabolic stress

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics, health

Whereas textbooks depict metabolism in perfect homeostasis, disturbances occur in real life. One particularly relevant disturbance, caused by excess food and alcohol consumption and exacerbated by genetics, is reductive stress. New work by Goodman et al. identifies a biomarker of reductive stress and uses a gene therapy solution in mice. This work suggests how exercise and an accessible nutritional technology can synergistically increase catabolism and relieve reductive stress.

May 29, 2020

A giant galaxy in the young Universe with a massive ring

Posted by in categories: evolution, space

In the local (redshift z ≈ 0) Universe, collisional ring galaxies make up only ~0.01% of galaxies1 and are formed by head-on galactic collisions that trigger radially propagating density waves2,3,4. These striking systems provide key snapshots for dissecting galactic disks and are studied extensively in the local Universe5,6,7,8,9. However, not much is known about distant (z 0.1) collisional rings10,11,12,13,14. Here we present a detailed study of a ring galaxy at a look-back time of 10.8 Gyr (z = 2.19). Compared with our Milky Way, this galaxy has a similar stellar mass, but has a stellar half-light radius that is 1.5–2.2 times larger and is forming stars 50 times faster. The extended, diffuse stellar light outside the star-forming ring, combined with a radial velocity on the ring and an intruder galaxy nearby, provides evidence for this galaxy hosting a collisional ring. If the ring is secularly evolved15,16, the implied large bar in a giant disk would be inconsistent with the current understanding of the earliest formation of barred spirals17,18,19,20,21. Contrary to previous predictions10,11,12, this work suggests that massive collisional rings were as rare 11 Gyr ago as they are today. Our discovery offers a unique pathway for studying density waves in young galaxies, as well as constraining the cosmic evolution of spiral disks and galaxy groups.